The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Science Archive represents a thousand-fold
increase in the total amount of data that astronomers have collected to
date. The pioneering instrumentation technology that made this possible
is matched by groundbreaking tools that let anyone in the world access
terabytes of SDSS data online.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey's Data Archive Server (DAS) provides public
access to data files produced by the SDSS data reduction pipeline. This
article discusses challenges in public distribution of data of this
complexity and how the project addressed them.

Using a database management system (DBMS) is essential to ensure the
data integrity and reliability of large, multidimensional data
sets. However, loading multiterabyte data into a DBMS is a
time-consuming and error-prone task that the authors have tried to
automate by developing the sqlLoader pipeline--a distributed workflow
system for data loading.

The SDSS is one of the first very large archives in astronomy and other sciences, as we enter the era of data-intensive science. Here the authors summarize some of the important and generally applicable insights they have gained (often the hard way!) over the past decade of SDSS development.